What’s the Point of Getting a Website if You’re a Small Business?

It doesn’t matter if you have been in business for thirty years or thirty minutes. The reason you are in business is to create a successful outcome for yourself, your clients and your staff. In order to be in business, you need to work from a location.

It doesn’t matter if you work from a high-rise office building in the city centre, from a shopfront in a small shopping centre or from your home office.

Wherever you work from, you need your potential client base to be able to find you.

The reason there are so many companies that have multiple shopfronts in all the major shopping centres, where potential customers will be able to find them, is so that they don’t miss out on sales opportunities just because customers happen to be shopping in a different shopping centre.

Or you will have car showrooms all bunching up in a close geographic zone so that when someone is in the market for a car, they will hopefully see their car dealership when they are looking at their competitors.

Historically this has been a successful methodology of having your customers find you, whether they were looking for you or not. Not anymore. That is what the internet is for.

So, where people used to let their fingers do the walking through the yellow pages, now they just type what they want into a search engine et voila – your business is in their lounge room.

No more excessive rentals for shopfronts and offices. You found them – they found you and just at the touch of a button.

You Don’t Have a Website? Why on Earth Not? 

Do you already have a constant customer base? Tell me that you have had a zero per cent attrition rate over the last five years and I will reward you.

I can do this because I know this is impossible. You have enough clients; you can’t service any more business? I don’t believe you.

I believe that you might use this as a throwaway line to get rid of pesky people trying to sell you a website but ask yourself this. Why do you seem to be getting so many sales calls trying to sell you on a website?

Because you need one. And it probably isn’t that you get so many calls. It is more likely that you don’t want to bother with a website, you think you don’t have enough time to think about it or maybe you even really believe that you don’t need one.

Or maybe you know you are wrong but might have to eat humble pie if you finally succumb to adding a website to your business.

Whatever is your truth, know this. Your business cannot survive without one. Speaking with trusted website design agencies with verifiable customer reviews is a great place to start discussing your first website. 

Something the pandemic has taught us – we can do business from anywhere. We don’t have to have a shopfront or an office.

We don’t have to get all tarted up to go to the workplace. Our customers can’t see what we are wearing when they find us online. 

Finding Business Online – And It Costs Nothing

My ride-on lawnmower broke down. The company I bought it from wanted to charge a lot of money to come to our property to collect it, take it to their workshop, repair it and return it.

And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if someone could come to our property and repair it onsite. 

I didn’t even know if this was a thing, but I typed “onsite mower repairs” into Google and I instantly had the names, websites and contact numbers for 3 businesses whose core business it is to do something I didn’t even know existed. 

And you know what? If there are 3 that have websites that I found so easily, there are many more that I would never have found that do the exact same business, but without a website, I will never know.

Reviews

Masterchef has a lot to answer for. Prior to Masterchef, we might have spread good or bad word of mouth on a business, but we would never have thought to take our dealings with a business into the public domain.

One excuse some people give that they don’t want a website is that they don’t want negative reviews. There are two very simple answers to that. 

1. Give exemplary service so that people write wonderful things about you
2. The positives greatly outweigh the negatives.

Ripped Off

Another reason businesses use for not getting a website is that they were previously ripped off or received a website that didn’t suit their business. And there are a great many people to whom this happened. 

When people bought their first computer the same thing happened. Because they didn’t know enough to know what they needed from a computer they didn’t know what they needed to buy. 

It didn’t stop them from buying their second and subsequent computers. They simply learned what it was that they needed from their 2^nd generation computer.

As it is with those that lost money on their first website. What is costing them more than the cost of their first website is the loss of business they are suffering by not trying again.

‘A Friend Is Creating a New Website for Me’

When I hear this from people, I translate it to ‘Never do business with friends and relatives.’ When planning a new website, it is imperative that it is done within your timeframe. 

When ‘friends’ say that they will do it for you, at mates’ rates, what they are really saying is that it will be done when they can fit it in.

It is too imperative to your business success to sit around waiting for someone that has already taken ages and still hasn’t produced anything. 

Your business is suffering from the lack of a functioning website. The expression ‘what costs nothing is worth nothing’ springs to mind.

You have invested a lot of money to get where you are. Now you must have a website that can take you to the next level.